How India’s major newspapers covered the RBI annual report which fully and finally put the seal of “failure” on the Narendra Modi government’s ill-advised, poorly thought-through, horribly implemented ego exercise called “Demonetisation”.

Barring The Telegraph, Calcutta, which doesn’t mince words calling it “The Great DeMo Deception”, most newspapers play it safe. Some like the Hindi daily Dainik Jagran and the Telugu daily Eenadu, seen to be part of the machinery, bury it.

The #DemonetisationDisaster is not on page one of the Bombay edition of DNA, owned by Subhash Chandra of Zee. Only two of the papers, Telegraph and The Tribune, Chandigarh, gave the news 8-column banner treatment.

The bland, passion-less coverage seems to suggest that the deaths of people standing in queues, the hardship undergone by the salt of the earth, the jobs lost by the “informal sector”, the businesses destroyed and the lives ruined by the hare-brained decision, barely matters.

In the patois of millennials suffering from ADD, for the media it is time to “move on”—and suck up some more.

One comment

De Mo was done with the right intention to unearth, crack down and confesticate black money. It has served its intention well at least in most cases if not all. Has it not increased the tax base, has it not tracked black money holders . The congressmen are beating their chests as non profitable exercise, because they simply want to pat their back being in the opposition.